adding Bessemer & Lake Erie ground textures

[gwgardner]

There are some really nice ground textures in the Bessemer and Lake Erie route. I got pemission from G-Trax to make the route a dependency for my Fort Worth 1925, but can't figure out how to add the ground textures to my textures.bin, because they are in an .ap file.

Should I simply tell players of my route that they have to unzip the Bessemer textures from the .ap before running my route? Is there a better way?

[GreatNortherner]

Hi,

You could give this a try:
[list=][*]extract the B&LE's texturing.bin from the .ap on your local machine
[*]open it and you own route's texturing.bin with RW Tools and copy/paste whatever texture entries you want to use on your own route over into your own texturing.bin in your route's .bin
[*]delete the extracted B&LE .bin from step 1 again
[*]see if it works [/list]

I don't actually know if this will work or not, but in theory it should. All the texturing.bin does is list file/path references to the terrain texture graphics and give them names and an order which you can use in the editor. Whether or not the linked files are inside an .ap file should (again, in theory) not matter. If it works, there would be no reason to give your users complicated "extract this and that" instructions as all they'd need would be your own texturing.bin with the links to the B&LE graphics inside.

Cheers
Michael

PS: Please note that when editing the texturing.bin, it is best to only add new entries at the end of the list. Changing the order of the textures will mess up any textures you have already painted on your route, as the MixMap seems to identify the terrain textures by its order from 1st to last in the texturing.bin.

[gwgardner]

Hi,

Thanks. I did that exactly. Didn't work until I manually unzipped the Bessemer textures.

I'll probably just use the RWA textures, which are similar, so the player doesn't have to unzip the Bessemer textures. I got the impression that the Bessemer textures, albeit similar, somehow have higher and more actively waving grass. I don't know, maybe that's just the weather?

[BoostedFridge]

Hi,

Thanks. I did that exactly. Didn't work until I manually unzipped the Bessemer textures.

I'll probably just use the RWA textures, which are similar, so the player doesn't have to unzip the Bessemer textures. I got the impression that the Bessemer textures, albeit similar, somehow have higher and more actively waving grass. I don't know, maybe that's just the weather?

If there is a different procedural flora sheet with the B&LE, then that grass could potentially be different, even on the same textures.

[GreatNortherner]

Ah, there goes my theory.

I don't remember any of us fiddling with the procedural flora texture, though I may be wrong. It most certainly was Wayne if one of us did in fact do so. Another possibility could be that Wayne assigned different grasses from the procedural flora texture than there are on the original Kuju ground textures and/or used higher density settings for them. This is something you can play around with to quite great effect, the two settings in the texturing.bin are FloraIndex and FloraDensity (0 to 1).

Cheers
Michael

[gwgardner]

Thanks to both for the info. Way over my head about the procedural stuff, but I'll try the changes to the textures.bin. I'll just go with the RWA textures, which I've already incorporated into the textures.bin for Fort Worth 1925. Yes, it's the Wayne Campbell stuff that I like with all the tall, wavy grass. Looks like the ubiquitous Johnson grass in Texas. I find that combining his textures with the Russian grass objects, using asset blocks, really looks good.

[gwgardner]

The FlorDensity parameter made the grass much ... denser. Just what I needed. Thanks again.